


The Only Boy in the World

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-12-13
Updated: 2003-12-13
Packaged: 2018-01-25 02:54:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,653
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1627799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What if that tranq gun hadn't been behind the counter when Willow needed it in "Dopplegangland"?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Only Boy in the World

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Angel

 

 

You never forget your first. Hers was some random-ass vamp, the same one who turned her. We're gonna have some fun, he'd told her, generic menacing guy-line, which had scared her so badly that she'd literally wet herself. The pain from his teeth in her neck and the pain... elsewhere, as the blood escaped her body from two places at once, like a candle burning at both ends, had just about cancelled each other out, so she was numb with it. You were sweet, random-ass vamp said as he'd pushed a bloodied wrist up to her mouth, held her nose so she had to drink if she wanted to breathe. When she awoke, he'd decided to act like a boyfriend and taken her for her first kill. High, giddy from all of the new sensations, everything fresh and electric, she'd twisted random-ass vamp's head right off like part of a toy she didn't like. Oops, she'd giggled. 

It was rude, taking advantage twice like that. Not that something like manners had ever stopped her, but it was different for girls. 

With Willow, other Willow, this version of her buffered in pink, like some twitchy caterpillar reluctant to shed its cocoon, she's, well, not gentle, but... precise. Deep within her mind rest memories of old episodes of ER, watching between splayed fingers as needles slipped sleekly through skin; she recalls them as she feels flesh part around her teeth. Has this other Willow seen those same episodes, is she thinking of those same images? Had she herself tasted like this once, powder-soft around the edges, vaguely fruity? Random-ass vamp might have been onto something. Come on, baby, she murmurs, raising her bitten wrist to the other girl's lips, letting her other hand wander up over her belly and into her panties. Sweet shock as she opens her mouth with a gasp and sucks. 

When pink Willow's silk-limp in arms, throat arched like a cathedral dome, she smooths back her hair, sweeps her tongue over glossed lips, tasting traces of powdery, vaguely fruity blood. 

"Hey, girl," is the first thing she hears, eyes rolling momentarily in their orbits before her lids rise. She's lying on her bed, arms crossed over her chest, like she used to pose years ago when Xander wrangled her into playing the Mummy to his Indiana Jones. 

"Who?" she begins, but the answer to that is obvious. This is her, the other her, but her all same. Her, who's sitting at the edge of the bed, running her hand over the comforter with an expression of distaste, looking like the devil's candy bar, wrapped in stiff leather. Suddenly, Willow wants very badly to feel the coolness of it, knowing that she herself is as dead as the animal whose skin that once was. 
    
    
         "I'm dead," she says.  The her dressed in leather nods, lacquered-looking hair unmoving.
         She pulls off her sweater, wanting to feel her own cool skin.  It's like pliant marble.  "I'm
    

cold." Other-her looks grave for a second, but then unlaces a smile that's not so much kneeweakening as knee-shattering. "I don't want to wear this anymore," and lets the sweater she's been holding like a pet drop from her fingers. 
    
    
         "Don't blame you."
         Encouraged, she shimmies out of her skirt, stands and lets it hit the floor.  She expected
    

to be unsteady on her legs, but she's not. Through the floor, she can feel the sounds of the traffic outside. "I could just go out like this." Places her hands on her hips- what could anybody say or do to her? 

Is this how Faith feels, why she dresses the way that she does? Does her strength make her restless, reckless the way that it seems to make Buffy hesitant, careful? Willow wonders if she'd be able to taste the answers in their blood. 

"Kinda conspicuous," Leather answers, "Maybe you wanna play it cool." Leather goes nose-first into her closet. "They smell like you," she says dreamily, rubbing her face against the sleeve of a shirt. After a few minutes of brow-furrowing scrutiny, she comes out with a dress that's only been worn once, to her grandmother's funeral. "This one smells like tears." 
    
    
         "It's wrong for these shoes."
         "Change your shoes," Leather shrugs.    
         "Yeah, right."  Self-conscious giggle.  Together, they decide on black patent leather
    

maryjanes. Leather presses a kiss to her lips, transferring some of her lipstick; she smears it into place. 

Dress Willow murmurs, "Hungry." 

The first one's some frat boy, pissing against a wall outside of a sports bar. Dress surprises herself by breaking his neck effortlessly. He's in midstream, and his dick slips right out of his hand. 

"I knew we were strong, but..." she can't be bothered to finish the sentence. His blood tastes the way the Bronze smells, like wood and beer and sweat. Leather watches indulgently. 

"All gone," Dress smiles, still vamped-out, kind of unsteady with new blood burning its way through her body. 

"What happened to my parents?" They're leaving the alley, having tossed the frat boy unceremoniously into a dumpster. 
    
    
         "Ate them.  You mind?"
         "Spilt milk."
         They intertwine arms.  "You know who we need?"
         Dress smiles, remembering the hunger, and the way it felt to satisfy it, both feelings
    twisting together.  "Who?"
         "Xander."
         "Oz."
         "Mm, both of them.  They can put on a show for us."
         "Do I have blood on my lips?"
         "A little."  Leather pulls her into a kiss.
         "You know who I always wanted?" Dress asks, feeling shy.
         "Who's that?"  The two of them walk arm-in-arm, swaying slightly, as though dancing or
    drunk.
         "Giles."
         "The librarian?" Leather snorts.
         "Oh, but he's so much more than that."  Dress smiles, heating up at the thought of him. 
    He would taste like...
         Leather seems to catch on to what she's thinking.  "We could find him..." she lifts her
    

head thoughtfully, "show him your new... dress." 

He'll never tell them, but sometimes, he's awfully glad to have Buffy and Xander and Willow gone. Oh, if they left him forever, it would break his heart, but every time they leave for a few hours, in those first moments he has on his own, he feels as though he's finally able to breathe. He can't recall the last time he was with adults, adults of his own choosing, not the few pinched faces he has to pass as a matter of formality to get to the library. It's almost snuck up on him, that this is his life. Once, he used to wish for intrigue, adventure- once, some of this would have passed for intrigue and adventure. But, really, it's sloppy and chaotic, it's not smooth and rich, not sleek with the promise of glory, like what he used to dream of, in what he calls his youth. Wesley Wyndham Pryce reminds him so much of himself that it aches. This is something else he'll never admit. Because, under the leather and the put-on of decadence, he was that bright, once, that irritatingly filled with hope. 
    
    
         And it is irritating- it worries at him like something consistently rubbing away at his skin.
         Something isn't right- he knows that the second that he sees her, through the window of
    

his office. It's something beyond her odd, loose trot, the wetness around her eyes, her torn dressand wasn't she wearing something different earlier that day? But these are the first things that he notices, when he looks up, not having heard her enter the library, but at random, so whatever other impression he gets quickly fades. 
    
    
         "Giles!" she cries.
         "Willow," he goes toward her, arms in front of him, as though he can feel her there before
    

she even reaches him. And then she's there, with her face against his arm, and she feels hard and cold. 
    
    
         "Giles, the girl, other me, she found me, and she, she made me..."
         "Are you hurt?" drawing back so that he can see her face.
         "N-no," she runs a finger under her eye, seemingly  more out of abashment than anything
    

else, "She, she was going to kill me, turn me, but I, I escaped. I don't even know how, it was all happening so fast, and-" she looks up, eyes wide, looks around, "she might have followed me..." looking around again. 

"It's all right," now he has to look around, as though she's hiding right in front of them, like those puzzles in which a scene conceals many shapes, "I'll..." his grip on her arms tightens; he must be hurting her; he lets go, "I'll... think of something." He rushes off toward the weapons cage; he's almost there when he hears her speak: "Hi, Sunshine." 

It all seems like a hallucination, all those toxic substances built up in his spine as of thirty years earlier finally all ganging up on him. Would that it were. He has a chance to turn around, to catch a glimpse of skin as white as egg shells before he's spun back around and has his head rammed into the metal latticework of the cage door. It's not a hard enough blow to knock him out- he's become quite a connoisseur of head injuries since he came to Sunnydale- just a hard enough blow to really hurt. It drops him; no strong hand yanks him back up. To see both of them right in front of him, it's- Well, again, he wouldn't be surprised if this were all just the revenge of some acid he took in 1970. The Willow in the dress, this dimension's Willow (his Willow) has her head on the shoulder of the other one, the one in leather that is like a dressing of rain on a black Bentley. 
    
    
         "And now I get to play?" asks Dress.
         "Get it while it's hot," says Leather, whose voice is slightly deeper.
         He doesn't let himself look up, can't bear to, as she walks over, so all he sees is the light
    

bouncing off of the toes of her shoes- black patent leather- and her ankles, like the necks of swans. 

She crouches in front of him, and he knows that he can still push her away; he knows that he has that much strength in him. Enough strength in him. To fight. But- 

"My friend and I were talking earlier," Dress casts a look over her shoulder, "We have kind of a bet going." Again, they smile at each other. 

This is how men go mad. Though he supposes that it usually takes much longer. And how many of them have been broken by a smile? 

"See, she thinks you'll taste like scotch. Because ya like to drink it so much. I told her that sometimes if you get close enough to you," she comes in close; he feels the air stir delicately as she sniffs at his neck, "you can kinda smell it." She leans in again; this time, she touches her lips to his. "You don't do breath mints," she looks over her shoulder, "He's British- I guess drinking on the job isn't such a big deal to them." 

Earlier, when he'd been told that she was- Well, he'd wanted to die. And when he found out that she wasn't- She was what they fought for, every day. If not her, precisely, than all that she was. Her sweetness. And here it is, only changed, like something fermented. Like sugar after it's been caramelized. 

"Now, I think," she says, her voice reminding him, suddenly, for some reason, of the leather strap used to sharpen razors, "that you'll taste sweet," her knee between his thighs, her weight pushed forward, "like sticky toffee pudding." Both girls giggle explosively, Leather even daring to cover her mouth with her hand. "So, we've got this bet to settle." 

"Really?" he finds his voice, as though he'd been groping in the dark for it, "What does the winner get?" 

Dress raises her eyebrows, regards him with what looks like pity. Softly, she says, "You." 

He can't watch her face change, so he only hears the moan of muscle altering itself, a second before the tip of a fang brushes his throat. A moment later, his wrist is torn into- the constant creak of leather as the other one moves is like a symphony of baby cats. 
    
    
         "Ha," says Dress, suddenly, "He's like a big chocolate bar."
         "Yeah, a big chocolate bar filled with booze."
         "No, I think that I was correct in saying that he'd be sweet.  He's like..." she smiles,
    "honey."
         "I'm sorry," says Leather stiffly, "but I just don't agree with you."
         He hopes that to somebody, somewhere, this is amusing.
         "I suppose that we'll just have to share," says Dress.
         "Well, he's not the only boy in the world," says Leather.  Is it wrong that it tickles him,
    being called a boy?
         Somebody's hand is in his hair; somebody else's hand is down his trousers- and when did
    

they get undone? Soon, he'll simply fade out, due to blood loss. They keep on biting him in new places; he feels like a piece of black construction paper, pockmarked by a stickpin, so that light shines through and it looks like the stars and the night sky. He only cries out when he feels teeth down there- he's not exactly sure where down there, but it hurts enough to worry him. Or, rather, it would worry him if he felt that there was a ghost of a chance of him living through the night. Hell, the hour. He wonders if they'll get to those decades-old hallucinogens that everybody always told him would stay in his body forever; he wonders if he has dregs, if by the time they get to them, they'll be seeing colors. 

He might just have gotten to the dregs of himself. He's not seeing colors, just... Wesley. What a way to ruin a good trip. 

"Oh, sod off," he says, or he thinks he says it; he can't rightly tell because somebody is screaming. Wesley's face turns into Ethan's. And he must be high, because that's actually a comfort. Perhaps this is the end; perhaps Ethan snuffed it sometime recently, and now he's come to shepherd him into eternity. 

"Hello, Ethan," he says and smiles. He can't see the two Willows anymore. Obviously, they don't get to go wherever he's going. If he's dying, should he really be in this much pain? He didn't notice it so much before, with their little mouths inhaling his life like smoke, but now that they've left, real pain, angry, ferocious pain has come to replace them. 
    
    
         Ethan looks at him, but then just turns right back into Wesley.
         "Look, I don't want to see you, all right," he snaps, "If I'm going to die, I'll at least get to
    choose my company."
         Suddenly, he's elevated.  The sound of metal on metal fills the room.  And he's... rolling. 
    Perhaps there's something to the saying "Going to hell in a handbasket".
         "Nobody's going to die, Mr. Giles," Wesley says firmly.  Giles almost believes him.  His
    

face becomes Ethan's again; Ethan shows him a smile made of pure mercy. "Everything will be right as rain, Ripper." 

Shaking his head though it hurts to do so, he laughs, "You always were a liar." 

"Great, my first day out, and I'm disfigured," Dress pats at her cheek, which sports a long burn in the shape of an arm a of crucifix. 

Leather's cradling one hand in the other, the injured one wrapped in a strip of velvet torn from Dress' dress. "It'll heal. Anyway, it makes you look tough." 
    
    
         "Really?" though it stings, she manages a game smile.
         "Yeah."  Leather touches her lips to the edge of the burn.
         "I'm hungry."
         "Me, too," Leather sighs.
         "Giles was yummy."
         "Mm, definitely."
         "Shame we didn't get to finish him."
         Leather looks mournful for a second, but then shakes her head purposefully.  "He's not
    

the only boy in the world." 

 


End file.
